The Development of Intellectual Faculties and the Educational Process

The author deals with the problem of intelectual faculties as important personality traits, the development of which is especially emphasided in connection with the realisation of the new conception of the educational system and the possibilities given for their improved development within the framework of the educadonal system. A substantial component of intellectual faculties is formed by the reasoning power. This gives rise to the important task of developing the reasoning process and its separate operations. Two approaches can be pointed out in this respect. While the first approach consist in training and practising individual reasoning operations on indifferent material, the second approach is linked with the application of new teaching methods and processes in the current curriculum. The author goes on to point out one of the means of activating and stimulating the pupils’ intellectual activity which every teacher can use adequately, and that is the use of questions and their application in the teaching process. This activating and stimulating fonction of questions depends on the one hand on their formulation, on the other hand on their application in the individual phases of the educational process. Of decisive importance are questions aimed at reasoning processes, i. e. questions asking about relationships, contexts, causes and consequences, which are also used in presenting new subjectmatter.